Galerie Hoang Beli and TAK Contemporary are pleased to present "Ville en Autoportrait " a solo exhibition featuring Sébastien Mehal.

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Can a city be read like a portrait— with character, psychology, memory, and contradictions? If we were to travel to Valdrada, the city imagined by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities, we would see how a city mirrored on water, reflecting not only its structures but also the self-awareness of those who inhabit or visit it. The account of Marco Polo to Kublai Khan becomes as much an exploration of the self as it is of urban imagination.

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With Ville en Autoportrait, Sébastien Mehal offers a perceptive and critical interpretation of the contemporary city, viewed as a mirror of the individual. As Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life, “The city is provisionally created as a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints and opinions.” The city here becomes both subject and stage. Beyond merely a backdrop, it becomes a body, a memory, a territory traversed by the social tensions, desires, violence, and hopes of those who inhabit it. 

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With this exhibition, Sébastien Mehal examines our intimate relationship with the contemporary city. combining cartography, architecture, photography, and moving images, it presents a fragmented portrait of a globalized urban world, while affirming that each city, like each individual, remains profoundly unique.

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